Celia Heritage’s
Expert guide
TRACING YOUR ANCESTORS’ GRAVES
Finding your ancestor’s grave for the first time can send a shiver down your spine and give you a tremendous sense of connection with your roots. A gravestone may also provide you with useful genealogical information. How easy a gravestone is to locate, and what to expect when you get there, depends on several factors, notably the period in which your ancestor died and where he lived.
Jargon busting
To start with let’s clarify some terminology: the words ‘graveyard’, ‘churchyard’, ‘burial ground’ and ‘cemetery’ are all words used to denote burial places and most of them can be used interchangeably. However, some have come to be associated with a particular type of burial place over the years.
Cemetery
Strictly speaking, a cemetery is a generic term to describe a place where people were buried. In the 19th cemetery it began to be applied more specifically to one of the many large privately-run or municipal cemeteries that grew up outside town centres as graveyards around churches became full or closed for other reasons.
A gravestone in Sedbergham, Cumbria. Gravestones can be useful in providing details of previously unknown family members, such as babies who died in infancy
ZOOM IN
To study the inscriptions and photos in this article in greater detail, visit h ttps: //f am i l y tr.e e/ CeliaGravestones
Search the web, plan your trip, find your ancestor’s grave
A gravestone in Banff, Aberdeenshire, from which we can calculate the birth year of the deceased was 1693, and his occupation was a ‘white fisher’
A stone in Brookland, Kent. You may be able to piece together information about unknown siblings for your ancestors in the graveyard
Burial ground
The term ‘burial ground’ is also a generic term for a place where people were buried, but this term was often used for Nonconformist (non-Anglican) places of burial.
It was also used for the many graveyards established from the 1850s following legislation that gave local church vestries the power to purchase new land for burials. This new land was often away from the original churchyard.
Churchyard